The Russia-U.S. Partnership, Driven to a New Low

MOSCOW — Whoever becomes the next president of the United States will have to deal with a Russia that seems both familiar and, increasingly, unfamiliar. For centuries, Russia has been a resource-exporting country, an economic laggard and a touchy partner, driven by a European culture and a decidedly un-European body politic. But now those constants have been joined by new factors: President Vladimir V. Putin’s political unpredictability and his readiness to use military force.

The Russia of the past two years seems to no longer care about lasting partnerships or international agreements. It scorns predictability and dependability as weaknesses. Its one successful reform since 2000 has been to revamp and re-equip its armed forces. Russia’s resources are stretched, but Mr. Putin seems determined to overcome those disparities with the West with political and military agility.

The depth of harm this has done to efforts to build a partnership between Russia and the West was evident last week, when a Syrian bombardment of a hospital near Damascus, in the wake of the failure of a cease-fire, prompted the American secretary of state, John Kerry, to suggest that Russia and its ally Syria be investigated for potential war crimes.

In an extraordinary move, the Kremlin on Tuesday canceled a visit by Mr. Putin to France; a comment by President François Hollande the day before that Russia might have committed war crimes was seen here as the likely reason.

The Kremlin’s intensifying confrontation with the West has already put the Russian economy under severe strain. But the Russian population seems to accept falling incomes and general uncertainty as the price of what its leaders portray as a national resurgence. Encouraged by the jingoistic state-run media, Russian society seems to applaud war policies that would subject a Western leader to fierce inquiries or removal from office by a disapproving electorate (the British prime minister Tony Blair’s fate after his acquiescence in the American-led Iraq war is one example).

Arguably, Russia is the only major power that no longer hesitates to shatter longstanding relationships with others. Mr. Kerry’s latest condemnation followed by a few days Mr. Putin’s decision to withdraw Russia from a longstanding treaty under which Russians and Americans were reducing their stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium. The bill Mr. Putin sent to Parliament for approval included a list of unrealistic conditions under which Moscow might return to honoring the treaty — a clear signal that the matter was closed. The conditions included a lifting of all sanctions imposed on Russia over Ukraine, compensation for all losses suffered in Russia as a result, and the reduction of America’s military presence in Central and Eastern Europe.

Mr. Putin’s decision to withdraw from the agreement was announced soon after an American decision to suspend negotiations with Russia for a new cessation of hostilities in Syria, where the Obama administration said Moscow had broken its previous commitments. In turn, Russia accused the United States of shifting blame for the cease-fire’s breakdown.

All of this took place in the shadow of horrific violence in the rebel-held eastern parts of the Syrian city of Aleppo, where 275,000 people are besieged and under Russian and Syrian government bombardment. The health and water supply systems neared the verge of total destruction amid reports that the pro-government forces were going after whatever was left of eastern Aleppo’s medical clinics and infrastructure.

The scenario was straight from Mr. Putin’s playbook. Pushing talks into a tight corner while intensifying the use of force was a tactic Russia used repeatedly during the hot phases of the Ukrainian war in 2014. Strobe Talbott in February contrasted the American use of “diplomacy backed by force” in the Balkans in the 1990s to Russia’s current use of “force backed by diplomacy.”

In Syria, Russian officials pay lip service to the humanitarian aspect of the siege, but dismiss it in practice. “The rebels of Aleppo are interested only in a kind of cease-fire that allows them to bring in more arms and replenish ammunition,” the daily Vedomosti quoted an unnamed source in the Russian Ministry of Defense as saying last weekend, in an effort to explain why a new cease-fire would be hard to reach. “On the other hand,” the source continued, “the government army is not strong enough to take Aleppo quickly.” The result: an agreement and an end to the carnage are as distant as ever.

Still, the Kremlin is convinced it is playing a winning game, so long as the United States is reluctant to intervene and Syrians, not Russians, absorb most of the casualties and damage. Even with the painfully slow pace of progress by Syrian government forces, Russia is unlikely to introduce ground forces (a politically dangerous move back home), and just as unlikely to abandon its ally, President Bashar al-Assad.

What Mr. Putin seems to think Syria offers is a magic portal that will help Russia leap to a new level of international recognition. Russia no longer sees itself as a power seeking to escape isolation imposed by the West for occupying Crimea and intervening in Ukraine. Instead, it pursues the claim of a victorious power whose transgressions become irrelevant because winners don’t have to justify themselves.

In hindsight, it is clear that the Russian and American administrations have both contributed to the current bilateral freeze. Just calling Russia a declining regional power, or counting on that status to bring it to heel, is not a strategy. At this point, it would be a herculean task for any new president to re-establish trust. Aleksandr Baunov, a Russian writer on foreign policy, has suggested that Mr. Putin had an unacknowledged goal for the impossible conditions of his legislation: He would drive the American-Russian relationship so low that a new American president would have no room to drive it lower. Releasing the tension would be hard too, because that would look like complying with Mr. Putin’s legislation. And Moscow seems to prefer the current state of unnerving alarm to seeking a new easing of tensions.

In short, the Kremlin has made its decisions: Put the onerous domestic problems aside, play the power game, do not blink, and call everything the West says a bluff. A victory, this thinking goes, will one day recoup all costs.

But what kind of victory would that be? Is there a city or a region that Russia might occupy that would bring Russia’s own citizens prosperity? Any regime presiding over a backward oil-dependent economy will not be able to modernize it by waging wars and poisoning every relationship it still has. It may not happen soon, but someday in the future, Russia will have to take up the hard work of fixing both its economic base and its position among its peers.

Maxim Trudolyubov, editor at large at the business newspaper Vedomosti, writes The Russia File blog for the Kennan Institute and is a fellow at the Bosch Academy in Berlin.